The sex bit was, not so much the harder part, abstaining for five weeks wasn’t really a problem, the problem was getting over the whole emotional thing of having this operation and letting someone, my husband, be close to me again. Because there was always that little thing in the back of your mind. For me it was like, what if he is the one that gave me HPV. It is highly unlikely, but what if he is, and what if I get it again or. There is so many things going through your mind. It’s the physical, you can’t see the physical scars, you can’t see the emotional scars, but I think it’s more emotional than physical a lot of this.
I felt very apprehensive about it. I don’t know whether it was because, like I said before, I was worried about maybe being infected with HPV which was highly unlikely. But I think it’s because you can’t see what’s happening. And, you know, they kind of say, “well wait five weeks and you should be fine.” But you can’t see that you’re healing. Okay the bleeding might have stopped but that doesn’t mean to say that you’ve healed. And I was certainly more concerned with the bleeding starting again, because I just found it a pain. I’ve not had a period for eight years, and suddenly I was bleeding and I had forgotten how messy it was. And I felt a little distant from him as well, at first.
And did it feel any different physically after?
No, probably not. The first couple of times [laughs] I expected, I did expect to bleed afterwards. I don’t know why, I just did. So there was a mad rush to the toilet just in case. But it was fine. Nothing like that happened. So, no, it didn’t feel any different. In fact it felt closer, I think in a way, maybe because we had had to wait for the five weeks after the procedure and then until I was ready. So I think the first few times it did feel a lot more intimate and a lot closer.
